Brooklyn (2015)

What if an Irish girl emigrates to America, gets in love and has to come back Ireland?

This movie is set in the Ireland and New York of the 1960s and I found the story beautifully told. The main topic is immigration and what is “home” but it also touches on love, career and duty to your family. Given that I’m an immigrant myself I thought this could add another perspective to my experience.

**SPOILER ALERT**

The main message is clearly spelled at the end of the movie:

[Some day…] you will catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past, someone who’s only yours. And you’ll realize that this is where your life is.

In my experience that is true. Since I graduated from university in 2010 I have been lucky enough to live in three different countries: Ireland, the US and Switzerland, but I met my wife soon after moving to Ireland and she has made me feel home since then. Would I have gone back to Spain or stayed in Ireland had I not met her? I don’t know. Part of my family lives in Spain and the other part in Japan. I look forward to visiting them every single time but whenever I visit them it doesn’t feel that I should have stayed there. It feels a bit like a level you have cleared in a video game. It brings you wonderful memories but now you are simply in a different place.

For me leading this nomadic life, which is a step up from moving back and forth between two countries that Brooklyn talks about, has the significant downside of making it quite hard to form intensive life-long connections and we are starting to feel the need to settle down. But whenever people ask me I recommend them to at least try the immigrant strategy over the “stay at home until you die” one: you get a better understanding of the world and exposes you to more views of life, it makes you stronger and you get more options both in terms of relationships and in terms of career which means more likely to lead a happy life. I wouldn’t have met my wife nor most of my friends had I stayed in Spain, I wouldn’t have the wonderful job I currently have and I wouldn’t have learned a big part of what I’ve learned.

So yes, I would recommend the movie to most people, specially to those who haven’t left their home country, it may resonate with you and trigger an experience that may change your life :-).